Unit 14
Land and Labor Relationships
Introduction to Unit
This unit explores some of the diverse systems of land and labor that existed before 1500, and contrasts them with
the increasingly globalized system of forced labor that resulted from the European conquest of the Americas. The
many systems of unfree labor can be classified into slavery and serfdom. In slavery, the slave is held and owned as
an individual who can be bought and sold. In serfdom, the serf retains personal freedom but is bound to the land
and is unable to move. Even though slavery did not endure in most parts of Europe after the decline of the Roman
imperial system, capitalist impulses there encouraged and even thrived on such forms of exploitation elsewhere.
Abundant land and limited labor in the post-1500 Americas led Europeans to look outward to other continents,
and to embellish on already-existing forms of forced labor for their own capitalist purposes. Transatlantic slavery
and forced labor on a massive scale thus came to characterize the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries. For some, this traffic in humans brought wealth and power. For others, it brought misery. For everyone,
it served to reinforce perceptions of difference between peoples, and it bolstered social inequalities.
Learning Objectives
· Identify some of the diverse systems of land and labor before 1500.
· Analyze how conquest affected systems of land and labor.
· Trace how and why labor systems changed on a global scale after 1500.
Preparing for This Session
Read Unit 14 in the Bridging World History online text. You may also want to refer to some of the Suggested
Readings and Materials. If you feel you need more background knowledge, refer to a college-level world history
textbook on this subject (look under the index for Southeast Asia, Slaves, Serfs).
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Unit 14
Unit Activities
Before You Begin—30 minutes
In small groups, look at a timeline in your textbook that shows large turning points in human history: shifts from
foraging to settled agricultural communities about ten thousand years ago; beginnings of major empires about
two thousand years ago; the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade about 600 years ago; and the beginnings of
factory labor during the British Industrial Revolution about 250 years ago. From the timeline, what can you conclude about the changes in the relationships between land and labor? What might you change about the timeline to show the relationships? What do you think the video will explain that can help you make the timeline more
annotated and illustrative of the relationship between land and labor?
Watch the Video for “Unit 14: Land and Labor Relationships”
—30 minutes
Activity 1: Changes and Continuities in Land and Labor
—75 minutes
In the historical examples given below, find information to help you create an illustrated and annotated timeline.
This timeline will chart the changes and continuities in the relationships between land and labor.
Example 1: Rome
Roman citizens could not be enslaved; they were free. But for non-citizens, there were many ways to enter into
servitude. Some adults became slaves in payment for their debts; others were sold as children to pay off their families’ debts. The majority of Roman slaves were prisoners of war, captured in battle during the conquests that
expanded the empire. Instead of being killed as enemy combatants, their lives were saved so they might be forced
into servitude. Consequently, the word for slave in Latin is “servi,”from the verb “to save.”As the empire expanded,
Romans had more land to work. Consequently, they developed a greater need for slaves. One important task was
extending the network of roads. Roman roads, built with slave labor, connected the slave estates with markets for
the goods they produced; they also afforded the military rapid access to the estates in case of trouble.
Example 2: Imperial Russia
By 1500, the tsars had expanded the Muscovite state to seven times its original size. The vast amounts of land they
now controlled made labor a valuable commodity. For many centuries, grain has grown on the steppes of western
Russia. Before the mechanization of agriculture, this crop required a large and dependable labor force. At first,
peasants moved freely from one estate to another. But by the sixteenth century, the landowning gentry prevailed
on the tsar to place the peasantry under their control. As the Russian Empire expanded eastward, grain fields—
especially along the growing frontiers—needed to be defended. To secure his territories, the tsar required all
landowners to serve the state, just as serfs served their masters. The Tsarist government passed decrees forbidding peasants to move from one estate to another. These decrees penalized those who helped fugitive serfs and
allowed landlords to bring back runaways by force.
Decree: Those peasants who were registered in 1601 should return to those with whom they were originally
registered; and should these peasants now be working for someone else, and if there is a search warrant for
them, those people who have such peasants on their estates should return them by 1616, together with their
wives, children, and their livestock. (Vasilii Shuiskii, “Decree Against Runaway Peasants, March 9, 1607,” in
Medieval Russia, A Source Book, 850-1700, 3rd ed., ed. Basil Dmytryshyn [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College
Publishers, 1990]: 373.)
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Unit Activities, cont’d.
Example 3: Southeast Asia
During the seven centuries between 1000 and 1700 CE, slavery in Southeast Asia developed in a different way
than the agricultural servitude that evolved under the tsars. In the Indonesian archipelago and the Malaysian
peninsula, agriculture was the major industry as it was in Russia. But farm laborers in these Southeast Asian
regions were neither serfs nor slaves—not even those who were in debt. Farm laborers owed a portion of their
produce to their lord, but they were not personally owned by him. Instead, it was in the mercantile city-states that
slaves were the most important item of property. In these urban areas, slaves symbolized the power and prestige
of the nobles who owned them. So important was slaveholding for one’s status that even foreign merchants had
to have men attached to them as bond servants in order to function effectively. Within port cities like Malacca and
Makassar, whose populations numbered up to one hundred thousand, the most characteristic roles for slaves
were as domestics, entertainers, and as textile spinners and weavers. Kings struggled with their nobles for control
of laborers. Under the system of unpaid state labor called “corvée,” kings sought to maximize the number of
people to do the work of the state. At the same time, nobles wanted as many hands as possible for their own private uses. In Southeast Asian Islamic city-states, there was often no ethnic difference between master and slave.
What marked the members of the elite class was that they performed no manual labor. A retinue of slaves
attended to their every need. Islamic laws that prevailed in Southeast Asian port cities like Makassar forbade the
enslavement of fellow Muslims. But that didn’t preclude the evolution of other forms of economic service—in payment of debt, or as punishment.
Example 4: Spanish Empire
Columbus enslaved some of the Taino he met in the Caribbean. He took some of them back to Spain, and others
he compelled to work on plantations he established on later voyages. Spanish priest Bartholemé de Las Casas
challenged the European attitude toward slavery when he wrote,
Wherever else in the world have rational men in happy and populous lands been subjected by such cruel and
unjust wars called conquests, and then been divided up by the same cruel butchers and tyrannical robbers as
though they were inanimate things? (Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America,
[Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1949, 1965], 127.)
The Spanish conquerors of the Aztec Empire benefited from the traditional labor tribute the Mexica required from
their subject peoples. In the Andes, the Spanish took over the mit’a, adapting it to increase their own wealth and
control rather than as a state tax system. By adapting the mit’a to their own uses, the Spanish were able to successfully exploit the silver mines at Potosi. Every year, fifty thousand Indians—miners and their families—were
forced to work the Cerro Rico Mountain at Potosi. Few who went to work the mine ever returned. In the sixteenth
century, scholastics like Hermes Sepulveda revived Aristotle’s notion of the “natural slave,” and racialized it to justify the enslavement of non-European peoples. The counter argument of the humanist friar Bartholemé de Las
Casas was that if the indigenous peoples of the Americas had souls and could understand and embrace the
Christian gospel, then they were equal in the eyes of God and His Church. Therefore, they were not natural slaves
and should not be enslaved.
Example 5: Kingdom of Kongo
King Affonso ruled the Kingdom of Kongo in the first decades of the sixteenth century. In a letter to the King of
Portugal, he complained about raids that turned his subjects into slaves. King Affonso I writes, “ ... merchants are
taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives ... they
grab them and get them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being
completely depopulated ....”(King Affonso,“An African Sovereign’s Opposition to the Slave Trade: Nzinga Mbemba
of Kongo, 1526,” Text 67 in C. Hilliard, Intellectual Traditions of Pre-Colonial Africa, [New York: McGraw Hill, 1998].)
Portuguese merchants, as they came along the coast of Africa, sought gold in West Africa; with time they also
brought goods that they’d purchased in India for sale. The people of Kongo sold ivory and copper and, in response
to the demands of some Portuguese, human beings.
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Unit 14
Unit Activities, cont’d.
Example 6: Caribbean Colonies
In the plantation society that governed the Caribbean islands, small groups of colonial masters controlled large
populations of African slaves. During the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, more than twelve million
enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic to do the grueling work of growing sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton. In the
plantations of the West Indies, it was common to work slaves to death. The cost of replacing an adult slave with
another adult slave was easy enough to meet, and that approach was preferred to spending the energy to bring
up children.
Example 7: Factory Work in Industrialized Economies
Wage labor was the system that allowed industry and agriculture to develop in Europe at the time when slave
labor, sweatshops, and other forms of unfree labor expanded in other parts of the world. Culturally, this system
led to the racialization of slavery to justify the massive African slave trade to the Americas. But the wage workers
in Europe recognized of the larger system: They described their condition as that of “wage slaves.”
Activity 2: Unfree Labor—45 minutes
Analyze the images below to answer the following questions.
· To what extent are these images reliable sources of information on the nature of coerced labor in Russia,
the Caribbean and Brazil, and the Spanish Empire in the Andes?
· What other kinds of information do you need to determine the reliability of these sources?
· Even though the images were made by artists, not unfree laborers, what kinds of information can historians
glean from the visual sources?
Item #3376. Anonymous, PEASANTS
RECEIVING THEIR LORD’S ORDERS BEFORE
GOING TO WORK, 1400S (n.d.). Courtesy of
Northwind Picture Archives.
Unit 14
Item #4831. Alexander Rippingille,
IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION IN THE
WEST INDIES, AUG. 1ST (1838). Courtesy
of The Library of Congress.
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Item #4392. Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala,
INCANS HARVESTING POTATOES (1615).
Image donated by Corbis-Bettmann.
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Unit Activities, cont’d.
Item #5942. Theodor de Bry, NARRATIO
REGIONUM INDICARUM PER HISPANOS
(1598). Courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book
Room, University of Pennsylvania.
Item #4427. Anonymous, CUBAN FARMERS HARVESTING SUGAR CANE (n.d.). Image
donated by Corbis-Bettmann.
Item #2447. Henry Coster, SUGAR MILL, BRAZIL (1816). Courtesy of The Library of Congress.
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Unit 14
Homework
Read Unit 14 in the online text, Section 3, Reading 3: Anand A. Yang, “Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in
the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,”Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): 179–208 and answer
the following questions.
Reading Questions
· What kinds of crimes led Indians to be sent to Southeast Asia?
· Why was there a labor shortage in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century?
· Compare the justifications that the British used in using convict workers in Southeast Asia with the transportation of convicts to British colonies in North America and Australia.
Optional: Visit the Web Site
Explore this topic further on the Bridging World History Web site. Browse the Archive, look up terms in the Audio
Glossary, review related units, or use the World History Traveler to examine different thematic perspectives.
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